This is an old revision of the document!


ENERGY FLUX

I've been interested in the cycle of everything, from nature to industry and back to nature, through organic matter to ideas. The cycle of carbon, for instance, this elementary atom of every organic molecule, of sugar, of gas, of petroleum etc. Thanks to the work done by bacteria and plants, carbon passes through every process in nature. And thanks to these processes humans take the energy needed for their activities. We are basically consumers, compared to plants, who can be considered the producers of our global system. Here is a PDF I created on this thoughts: http://fietsenenbroodjes.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/energy_cycles.pdf

WASTE

A great deal of our civilization's crisis is how we based our system on mass production, mass consumption and massive waste. We extract materials and generate garbage in unsustainable rhythm and the way we relate to nature is an important aspect of this process. Along centuries we relied on nature, we have made fantastic discoveries and technological inventions, yet we didn't learn to be efficient. More recently we have started to recycle things. But according to some experts, we are far from being sustainable as long as we stick with the concept of waste. “Sustainable” isn't good enough. We have to be as efficient as nature. We need to revert this process by re-using 100% of materials, with clean, fast, cheap methods.

An American architect, William McDonough and an Austrian chemist Michael Braumgart have devised the Cradle to cradle design, which proposes the transformation of things just like as we learned in Physics, with the Law of the Conservation of Energy (“Energy cannot be created or destroyed, but it can be transferred or transformed from one form to another; including transformation into or from mass, as matter. The total amount of energy in a closed system never changes”). Check their site: http://mbdc.com/ (and information in dutch http://www.cradletocradle.nl) And here is the link to a Dutch doc on the cradle-to-cradle idea: http://tegenlicht.vpro.nl/afleveringen/2006-2007/afval-is-voedsel-deel-1.html

HUMAN CULTURES

In a further extension I believe the vicious cycle of consumption and waste is applied not only for materials, but as well for living beings, and even humans. Unless we re-think our system we will keep on wasting energy and maintaining the process of slavery.

http://fietsenenbroodjes.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/energy-slaves-working-24_7.jpg

Based on the Mother Earth's Declaration of Rights I'm working on the idea of humans becoming more useful for the environment, just as plants, funghi and bacteria. http://deoxy.org/meme/UNIVERSAL_DECLARATION_OF_THE_RIGHTS_OF_MOTHER_EARTH

Another interesting idea comes from Humberto Maturana, biologist and philosopher, who studied the principle of AUTOPOIESIS within living organisms: http://www.oikos.org/mariotti.htm

Inspired by how much we can learn from plant systems, I listed a number of principles from plant universe which could be used for re-designing the human body and human relations:

Efficiency - 0% waste Survival strategies - Endless; such as self-defense or being beautiful to attract the right agents. Live network - sharing nutrients, signals and physical structures No private property - hosting other life forms Moving both up, towards light and down, towards earth Spread and replicate as much as possible Produce for the near and the far future

After this list I made up an exercise using the people at the groWorld research, for reflecting on human connections, which resulted in the following images.

  • project_groworld_energy_flux.1329400218.txt.gz
  • Last modified: 2012-02-16 13:50
  • by blud